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The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics: Twenty Years in Retrospect

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

W. Y. Elliott
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Extract

THE editors of the Review of Politics have asked me to do something that is indicated by the title of this informal essay. It is something that I have long had in mind. Substantially I am asked to assess after the passage of almost twenty years the thesis laid down in The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics. Ordinarily the biography of a book or of a writer's ideas had better, in good taste, be left to others. But I hope that I may be forgiven some notes on the nature of that work, because of their relevance not only to this return to the subject, but because of their relevance as well to what seems to me to be a general change in scholarly attitude toward a central problem: the place of ethics and the place of science in that study which Aristotle named by one word, Politics. It is peculiarly a pleasure to contribute this revision of a position to a journal devoted to the high cultivation of that Aristotelian conception. The distinction already achieved by the Review of Politics is in itself a witness of the changed temper of contemporary thought to a deep concern with political values.

Type
Articles
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 2 , Issue 1 , January 1940 , pp. 1 - 11
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1940

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References

1 See for a characteristic attempt at giving a theoretical base for these efforts the earlier works of G. E. G. Catlin.

For an idea of the extent of this movement in the U. S. A. one has only to turn to the Proceedings of the various conferences on Methods in Political Science, supported by the Social Research Council, with the interested sponsorship of C. E. Merriam, Arnold Bennett Hall, and many of the school of what I may call “Public Administrators.” The Committee on Method in the Social Sciences, sponsored by the same Council under the chairmanship of Professor R. M. McIver, took a more comprehensive view of the problem of methods, as might have been expected from its chairman, a soundly trained philosopher. However, the dominant tone may be seen from A Case Book on Method in the Social Sciences, edited by Stuart Rice. See especially my critical essay on W. B. Munro and G. E. G. Catlin in this volume.

2 That this view is quite commonly accepted by Mr. Dewey's own disciples and partisans may be verified by reading MrVivas', Eliser essay on “John Dewey's philosophy” in the Partisan Review, Vol. VI, No. 3, spring, 1939Google Scholar.

3 The Phantom Public, passim.

4 This notion naturally derives from the conception of morality as being “disinterested” (Preface to Morals) and it is further developed in the trial-by-lawyer technique of the common law advocated in The Good Society.

5 See his “Democracy and Dissent,” Political Quarterly, October, 1939, retracting his earlier views in Constitutional Government and Politics.

6 See his “The Moral Norm of Social Science” in The Journal of Social Philosophy, October, 1939.

7 Ibid., p. 21.

8 Out of the wealth of such studies one might suggest as of especial interest for this purpose Frederick Schumann's The Nazi Dictatorship, Roberts, Stephen H., The House That Hitler Built, pp. 11–58Google Scholar, Melvin Rader, No Compromise—The Conflict Between Ttoo Worlds, and Rauschning's, The Revolution of Nihilism, passim.

Of these Mr. Rader's recent work most nearly places both Italian and German Fascism in the perspective that I attempted, though with too great positive reliance upon “science” to find moral values. Rauschning's brilliant work is interested in proving too much, though it fits my thesis peculiarly well.

9 See his article in Harpers, (Dec. 1933), in addition to his Logic of Modern Physics and its application in later works.